Knowledge management has been a focus of businesses and other types of organizations for the past several decades. There has been a wide-spread recognition that more effective and efficient management of knowledge is critical for most businesses. Nevertheless, there has historically been a disappointment in the actual value generated by knowledge management initiatives.
There have been several reasons for this disappointment. First, the informational scope of most knowledge management approaches has traditionally been limited to information that is in the form of text-based and/or multi-media-based documents, or more broadly, “unstructured” information. What this informational scope omits is “structured” information such as, for example, financial information. Further, this historical domain of knowledge management has not typically encompassed other types of “knowledge assets” such as computer-based interactive programs, and human resource-based assets (i.e., people).
A second cause for disappointment with knowledge management is that there has been a lack of useful quantification methodologies associated with knowledge assets, and which explicitly encompass the organizing structures of the knowledge assets. This has made it difficult to establish a credible baseline of knowledge asset and management value, and to thereby measure improvement from the baseline. In other words, in the prior art there has been little transparency with regard to which knowledge assets are truly valuable and which are not, on either an absolute or relative basis.
A third cause for disappointment with knowledge management is that computer-based knowledge management systems have been insufficiently automatically adaptive, requiring the need for significant on-going manual effort to keep collections of knowledge assets well organized for multiple purposes or applications. After heroic initial manual efforts to effectively organize knowledge assets, knowledge asset “entropy” inevitably increases over time, and the knowledge assets and their structure becoming decreasingly useful.
In addition to these causes of disappointment, knowledge management initiatives have historically been primarily internally managed by businesses and institutions. Web Services, or more broadly, on-demand computing approaches, have generally not been applied since knowledge management-related software has typically not been available in Web services form, and collaborative knowledge management among one or more knowledge management suppliers and a knowledge management customer, including technology and/or services, has been awkward to implement. This has limited the value that third party suppliers could deliver to customers in the area of knowledge management, and reduced the ability of knowledge management customers to leverage third party capabilities.
Hence, there is a need for an improved method and system for managing collections of broadly defined knowledge assets, for valuing alternative organizing approaches associated with the knowledge assets, and for delivering knowledge management oriented technology and services to customers.